STATE HOUSE ROUNDUP -- A week of government inaction

Monday

The State House was populated by two main groups last week -- people asking for things to be done, and people not doing them.

The far-more-numerous first group is dependent on the second, and that's where things get frustrating.

From Voke-Tech Lobby Day, to rallies for the Safe Communities Act, free public college education and the preservation of sexual-identity counseling, important and interesting public questions brought citizens by the hundreds to the State House to make themselves heard and call for action.

Now, as to the second category, the House and Senate convened several times and passed a smattering of congratulatory resolutions and sick-leave bank bills. The Senate March 20 held a formal session, so called because it sets the stage for votes on significant items. No such votes were taken.

In the basement, a group of woebegone freshpersons still malingers, having wintered in the bowels of the building and still awaiting the day when their committee cubicles are ready and they can ascend to their permanent homes. Committee assignments, which define the bulk of the office space in the building, were made five weeks ago. The session began Jan 4.

As will occur when nothing occurs, the referendum route was invoked. Student activists turned out in force to say if they can't get satisfaction on their desire for tuition-free attendance at state colleges and universities, they will head for the ballot in 2020.

To be fair, this is a complicated state facing difficult issues. Some legislative committees have new chairpersons learning their roles and issues. Haste can be the enemy of good deliberative balancing of interests. Most items have funding implications dependent on a budget process that needs many weeks to play out inclusively.

Still, months have gone by and nothing has happened. Florida, a much larger state with a much larger economy and a $90 billion state budget, is cantering through its legislative agenda, in a session that began March 5 and will end May 4 -- to name one example of the many states that annually take up and resolve their agendas with far more dispatch than Massachusetts. No one in charge seems able to articulate why it needs to take so long to accomplish work that larger states get done so much sooner, or concerned about the slow pace.

The top item of the week, was, fittingly, a top-urgency item of 2017 with no specific timetable for resolution this year. Hundreds of educators, local leaders, teachers and equity activists filled Gardner Auditorium beyond capacity to tout one or another billion-dollar solution to the education achievement gap.

There's near-universal agreement the distribution formula for state dollars has to be updated, and the amount of those dollars should be increased. The main questions before the Education Committee -- how, and how much?

The governor and Education Secretary James Peyser led off, making the case along with Education Commissioner Jeff Riley for their budget proposal to increase state aid to education $200 million this year, and $1.1 billion over seven years, with the money targeted at low-income districts. Major improvements are possible starting immediately, without raising taxes, they claimed.

They were followed immediately by Sen. Sonia Chang-Diaz (D-Boston) and a bevy of supportive legislator advocates, who declared the governor has set his education-improvement ambitions much too low, and that methods must be found to bring poor, urban schools out of a condition where their students have no hope of getting as good an education as their wealthier, whiter peers.

So in some sense, the hearing like the issue itself was a matter of PROMISE versus reality -- the PROMISE Act propounded by Chang-Diaz versus the reality that it would take billions to bring Orange and Fall River and Chelsea up to the level of Lexington and Cohasset, billions more than the governor or Legislature seem willing to propose in new revenue.

The House and Senate could not agree on which path to take last session, appalling the entire education sector, and Chang-Diaz was removed as education chair in favor of Sen. Jason Lewis (D-Winchester), whom Senate President Karen Spilka perhaps viewed as more likely to bring to closure a bill with a formula more amenable to all parties.

Note there the replacement of an urban lawmaker with a suburban one -- a tension reflected in the testimony before the committee and the questions it asked. James Kelcourse of Amesbury spoke of his pride in his school and its work, and asked a quartet of New England Patriots what the PROMISE Act would do for his suburban, more-affluent district.

The football players were on an offseason mission to pursue what they see as social justice, and Devin McCourty fired back at Kelcourse, "You got to level the playing field." He extended the football analogy to say players show up for practice with different skill levels, and it's the coach's job to find ways to help players from different starting points reach their maximum potential.

With the daylong hearing behind them, the committee and legislative leadership will now set about blending all the factors and addressing funding-formula corrections first formally identified as necessary in 2015. The question, with education funding as so many other items, is when they'll finally cross the goal line.